Courses of Study 2011-2012 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Courses of Study 2011-2012 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ART 2901 - The Roman Palimpsest


Fall. 3 credits.

Counts as in/out-of-college elective for BFA students. Cornell in Rome.

Staff.

Capital of empires for more than two millennia and continuously inhabited for well over three, Rome presents itself to the well-informed observer as a palimpsest in space, that is, as a 3D page written upon, cleaned of its writing (though never entirely), and reinscribed in the visual and material idioms of later eras, often multiple times. This course investigates the history of Roman figurative art, architecture, and urban change from antiquity to the present through first-hand study of Rome’s most important historic palimpsests: buildings erected on top of earlier buildings; sculptures and paintings reworked to serve new figurative purposes; works appropriated and assigned new meanings; and art collections formed, installed, dismembered, and reassembled in response to changing tastes, representational needs, and economic conditions.



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